Embodiments herein generally relate to printing in colorants beyond the standard cyan, magenta, yellow, black (CMYK) and to systems and methods that automate when the more expensive non-standard colorants should be used.
Non-standard colorants are those other than cyan, magenta, yellow, black (CMYK) and are sometimes referred to as extended gamut colorants. For extended gamut N (beyond CMYK) color printing devices, customers want to pay for the more expensive extended gamut colorants only when there is an image quality benefit. Currently users manually select either the output CMYK mode or the CMYK plus extended gamut mode(s) based on knowledge of the job color content.
The extended gamut image quality advantages occur when objects are defined to be printed with the extended gamut colorants and when there are spot color objects that need the extended gamut to achieve an exact (or closer) colorimetric match as compared to standard CMYK printing.
For the common source color spaces such as CMYK specifications web offset publications (SWOP), the image quality benefit of extended gamut colorants is minimal (e.g., just a small portion of an image's input gamut intercepts with the extended print gamut colorants). The image quality can also suffer (e.g., contours, graininess, etc.) when the input color spaces are printed with an extended gamut.